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Trump's $1.8b slush fund could turn into giant can of worms
At the very least, it'll make the midterms messy.
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On Monday, President Trump “settled” a lawsuit he filed against himself for the low-low price of $1.8 billion of your tax dollars. But he’s not pocketing any of that money, perish the thought!
In an act of characteristic selflessness, Trump is giving it all away to his most loyal supporters, the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and were cruelly victimized by the Biden Justice Department’s campaign of “Lawfare and Weaponization.”
And it’s not just J6-ers invited to queue up for cash. Step right up and collect your payday, clinic harassers, anti-vaxxers, and patriots targeted “based on improper ideological criteria.”
Papa Trump is about to make it rain.
Suing yourself is the ultimate act of onanism
The grift was originally conceived as a plan to enrich Trump himself.
In 2024, the president’s sweatiest lawyer, Daniel Epstein, went on Fox Business and announced that he was suing the government for $100 million. In fact, what he did was file an administrative complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) alleging various abuses in connection with the raid that turned up hundreds of sensitive government documents at Trump’s private club.
The claim was hopelessly defective — FTCA claims are almost impossible to win against law enforcement officials — and yet last October it emerged that Trump was “settling” with his own administration for $230 million.
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In January, Trump struck again.
This time it was a demand for $10 billion from the IRS over the 2020 disclosure of his tax returns by an contractor who leaked thousands of returns of the wealthiest Americans to ProPublica and the New York Times. That suit was even more defective than the first: damages are limited by statute to $1,000 per disclosure, the statute of limitations is two years from the date the disclosure is discovered, and Trump himself controlled the IRS at the time.
There’s also the minor matter that the Constitution limits courts to adjudicating live cases and controversies, and the president openly admitted that he was negotiating with himself because he runs both teams.
Judge Kathleen Williams appointed six learned lawyers to evaluate whether she had jurisdiction to hear a case where the plaintiff and defendant are the same person. The panel suggested that further inquiry was necessary to asses the independence of the lawyers running the DOJ’s case, pointedly noting that the government vigorously fought off similar suits from other victims of the 2020 leak. The New York Times reports that the IRS’s lawyers drafted a 25-page memo in April rubbishing Trump’s suit and urging the Justice Department to fight it.